Juris’s skeptical view of war news arriving from the States–from his vantage point on the ground in Viet Nam: *“Slow but sure progress they keep telling us, but it’s a little hard to see any change when you are up this close to it. Who knows, maybe McNamara has a better view from his plane when he hops over now and then.” *“Johnson and everybody in the Pentagon seem to think we are finally winning the war but I wonder if the VC have found it out yet. Radio Hanoi is putting out quite a pitch too. The way they talk Reagan will never even run for the presidency because they’ll be in California before November.” *“Much talk and nothing being done. I don’t know, it sounds like such a sideshow. The president, Ho Chi Minh, Joan Baez, the Pope, and Joint Chiefs of Staff too. Hell everybody. GI’s are very democratic that way. Sounds like a football game or something. Johnson running around waving Gallup polls and casualty lists. Hooray, we’re winning. Quite a spectator sport this hawk-and-dove business. Alas.” *“We haven’t reached another turning point, have we? They’ve turned so many corners already that I’m getting dizzy from it all. Rather suspect we’re going around in a circle.” *”I keep thinking how nice it would be to open a newspaper and see by the headlines that the postman lost a spoke on his bicycle yesterday and fell over while on his rounds. Earthshattering stuff like that.”
Juris first noticed the “rust dust” of Viet Nam even before he shipped out, when he was assigned to process returning soldiers at Travis AFB, north and west of San Francisco. This comes from the diary he started at Travis and took with him to Viet Nam: “The closest we come to Frisco is the damp chill from the bay. Restricted to the tiny debarkation point. The trick, of course, is to duck the daily formations and the details that go invariably with them. A real drag in themselves too, the roll called for those who will ship, the chaplain’s welcoming message—the same hearty spiel each formation, and then the details. “The place is overflowing with GIs going out, over a thousand in the daily formations. Only a handful, it seems, coming in. They trickle in at odd hours of the night, shivering in their khakis, tanned with white eyes, their uniforms and boots tinged with orange, dust perhaps. We are detailed to help process them. Health check, showers, new green uniforms and out. “They seem such a passive lot, oblivious to the snap-to-it stateside manner. Some of the young, green GIs pulling detail are downright brash and rude, but their cocky ill manners go unnoticed by the higher ranked veterans killing the last few hours before freedom. Leaves, separation for many—home. “At five the beer halls fill up quickly. The whole place is so small and seems so removed from the rest of the world. We are close to the pier and physically it is not a small spot but so much of it seems idle. “Sleeping in the warehouse the last night. Like something out of an old D-Day movie—one vast hall full of bunks and milling bodies, packing, sleeping, bent over books, dog tags jingling, the snap of metal lighters, jittery bravado and solitary contemplation of the ceiling that envelops the entire scene like a second sky. Huge and ominous.”
Juris’s sympathy for the plight of the Viet Cong runs through “Red Flags,” but that, too, was evident from his earliest days in Viet Nam. He’d only been in country for a few weeks when he wrote this: “They were telling us how safe the replacement camp is the other morning when a mortar went off about 500 yards out. ‘As I was saying,’ the man continued, ‘the area is secure.’ Very funny. It really is safe though. 500 yards is about as close as those poor VC can get. They haven’t got the money to get closer. I guess that’s the advantage of being capitalists. I really feel sorry for these tenacious people. They’re holding off the whole big U.S. with not much more than pea shooters. And don’t let LBJ’s hearts and flowers speeches fool you, either. These GIs are trying their damnedest but at best they can make their own positions safe and maybe hold some of the country during the day. At night it all goes back to the Viet Cong while the Americans huddle together in their perimeters. “You’ve got to respect these VC when you see how thick and ugly and barbed this thorny jungle is. It’s all the GIs can do to just cut the stuff down during the day. And the VC go right through it at night as if it weren’t there. How they do it no one knows, but it must be quite a grueling job to get through without cutting yourself to shreds. And every night they try — and get shot to hell as a flare goes off set off by a trip wire. The guards in the bunkers can’t even see them. They just spray everything and wait until morning to find out what or who they hit. And so it goes day in and day out – like some half-assed seesaw. If the sun just wouldn’t go down it would be okay. Too bad this isn’t the North Pole. “And now to say my prayers and wish McNamara well. Heaven knows, he’ll need more than the old American dollar for this one. What a bill it is going to be.” What a bill indeed. The American ‘solution’ to the problem of the jungle, Agent Orange, continues to take lives — both military and civilian — to this day. May, 2019, was the first Memorial Day we had to count Juris among the casualties of that war.
Juris’s sense of the absurdities and waste — on all sides — of the Viet Nam War wasn’t the result of later reflection and research — although God knows he did plenty of both. It was there from the start. In his diary, the 23-year-old Juri describes his last day on American soil: “Spent the day waiting for a plane at Travis AF Base, drinking coffee and watching the prophetic hot dog machine. It seems like another omen. Poetic. Tropic heat, sweltering row upon row, rising and falling, skewered in ranks.” Two days later he writes: “Viet villages make U.S. shanty slums look good. These poor people. God save those the U.S. sets out to save.”
Juris had apparently been planning to write about Viet Nam for decades before he actually wrote “Red Flags” and “Play the Red Queen.” These are character sketches he wrote in the 1960s or early 1970s for what seems to have been some sort of heist novel with veteran protagonists. Of the five main characters, three are Black, and reflect Juri’s observations of race relations in and out of the army:
“*Frank, about 27-28, is the oldest of the vets. He had enlisted for an extra year and did a second tour in Vietnam to avoid the regimentation of stateside duty and make rank faster. Was quite seriously considering a career in the army. Quite straight. Dry but steady. He had been the platoon sergeant, well respected, especially trusted for his fast, good judgments in combat situations. Had the fewest casualties of any platoon. Would balk against officers when he thought they were endangering his people. Decided against a military life after returning to the U.S. “Working at an employment agency or Detroit auto plant in a mindless job well below his talents. Unused to not having the respect and obedience that were his in the army. Not an equivalent ‘rank,’ his job on the outside, but he can’t see the army or the war as a permanent answer. “A good dresser, maintaining the proper image prescribed by the Man for the acceptable Negro. Mature enough not to show how he hates being patronized but does indeed hate it, although he knows the fight is all uphill and will go on beyond his lifetime. “Distant from the others by virtue of his age, character, rank in the service. Yet he’s the one they obey instantly. “*Bernard, in his early twenties. Always unhappy with the Man. Always in trouble because of it. Expelled from high school. Got back in because the coach interceded. Busted a lot in the army. Constantly given the most dangerous and dirtiest jobs as a result of resisting the white officers, fighting the system. Went AWOL from a hospital near Saigon, where he was recuperating from a shrapnel wound, and wound up in “Soul Alley,” the Black GI Casbah. “To get out of the Alley, he drugged himself and surrendered to the military as an addict because of some amnesty granted to hooked GIs. Not prosecuted for going AWOL. Put into Frank’s platoon on the theory that a Black sergeant might be able to handle him. “Reed handles him by bluntly telling him the situation—that the white, soft, educated, humane officers would indeed get him killed. That it was for real, and the only way out would be to keep quiet until he rotated, or got killed. “After the service he got really involved in political, militant Black groups. “*Sylvester “Silver” Reed, in his early twenties. From NYC, has known Bernard since high school. The company requisition, known for his ingenuity in bartering and permanent borrowing of equipment, rations, clothing, munitions, vehicles, etc., as needed by his outfit. His black market side ventures –“Black capitalism,” as Silver calls it—are known but tolerated by the commanding officer because Silver is as likeable as he is larcenous. He never knocked over anyone in his own outfit, charged the lowest interest loans to other GIs. He did sell souvenir weapons, flags, etc., to young officers in the outfit but this really amounted to just another example of Silver’s agility and psychological know-how in dealing with people allegedly smarter and better educated. Sort of a standing joke that the young lieutenants would fall for high-priced junk. Sort of selling snow to the Eskimos. “Went to school with Bernard, where both played basketball. Similar only in that neither one will obey the System, any system. However, Silver has specialized in circumventing obstacles created by his color to get his way while Bernard resists openly and frontally and has always been in trouble with the Man. Silver takes the Man and the Man even likes him. “Wants a bankroll to open a gambling house in NY or a club in Denver, where he has been stationed for the last nine months. “Always scheming, though many of his ‘schemes’ are not taken seriously, just enjoyed by his buddies. Many of them were just part of the wheeler-dealer role, but now Silver has come up with a quick, big money idea that is for real.” Unfortunately, Juris’s notes don’t say what the quick, big money idea is – or how Bernard, Silver, and Frank will come together to pull it off ….
Not surprising to anyone who knew him, Juris became attached
to children of all ages in Viet Nam. “Every other day I go down and tutor a
Vietnamese kid in English. He’s a bright kid—seventeen—and unusually open for a
Vietnamese, perhaps because he’s bounced around so much. Both his parents died
some time ago so he has done quite a bit of that. Finally wound up here in Cheo
Reo where his older brother (19) runs a small shop. I’ve gotten him some books
(Viet to English) that they use in Saigon and a Viet-English dictionary. He’s
an intelligent kid but his books and the stumbling efforts of his teachers are
not too good so it’s awfully hard to tell how much he has learned. All I know
is that he downright surprises me at times. I will soon have to leave him to
his books and his own resources.”
A few lines from letters Juri received from his former
student, who signed his letters “Your affectionate brother,” and “Your young
brother” and “Your young brother Vietnamese”:
“My dear brother. You returned your country that is American one rich region. Do you have the please or the sorrow when you good-bye Phu Bon? I will be the sorrow, because the come day I do not see you, when I will go to New York? I don’t know. “When you lived in Viet Nam what you saw the shadow of the war, you saw the wreckage because the bombs and the bullets. “We are the people Vietnamese. We life on the small rigion of world. But we have the war, our house fall many persone die. Before day we have many rice, today we have few rice. That is a sorowfall shadow. It’s a war. The war is a hill. That day we will have the shadow of the war, the husband will to forget the wife, the baby will to die. “VN’s war needing many soldiers. I may go to army in the vacance this year! My grand mother worry me too much.” After Juri returned home, he tried to maintain contact, but after the fall of South Vietnam, he feared that any association with an American would put his student’s life in danger, and stopped.
In many ways, Juris’s experience in Viet Nam was atypical, including the “unwritten understandings” between Americans and VC in the neighboring town: “The war seemed far away. We were miles from the border where major American units tried to interdict the arms and infiltrators dripping into the nation’s lower half. Unlike the major theaters of the Indochina conflict, in the little province capital, unwritten understandings with the enemy existed. The town and surroundings were, to the unarmed, a safe and neutral zone. A truce prevailed that allowed wary GIs to stroll without rifles into the village for a strong Vietnamese beer or a haircut at the town’s leading barbershop run by a Francophile sentimentalist whose key ring was anchored by a hard coin of the French era. Even while the war roiled all around, only rarely were shots fired out of anger in the city limits, and even then the odds were that a jealous South Vietnamese had popped off a round at a mongrel American ally, not that a member of the opposition, home on leave, had been interfered with in his peaceful pleasures in the bosom of his family. Indeed, we sometimes sat in the dizzying heat of the afternoon drinking an American bottle of pop from Bangkok watching a pajama-clad stranger enjoying a mentholated cigarette and iced beverage, each patron eyeing the other, and the telltale bulge of a sidearm under the other’s shirt, across the empty café.”
In Vietnam Juris had a pet civet called Lovey that climbed like a monkey and traveled on his shoulder. Unfortunately, civets were considered food by the Montagnard guards and one day Lovey disappeared. Juri was philosophical about it: “We had a captain we didn’t like. They ate his parrot too, so I forgave them.”
A poetic moment from Juris’s Viet Nam diary, written at the height of the rainy season in 1967: “A very civilized sound, the rain on the concrete walkways. But out past the buildings, on the other side of the perimeter and wires and snagging barbs, obscured by the thick downpour, the rain touches quietly to earth. Caught by the green flesh of the jungle it slides silently down the trunks and stalks and shoots onto the soft floor below. “I don’t feel any more. I am cut off even from sensation. I am being absorbed.”
As readers of “Red Flags” know, Juris served on an small, extremely isolated base adjacent to a tiny town. The roads in and out were too dangerous to use for supply runs, so everything arrived — when it arrived at all — by air. This report comes from late September, 1967: “Running out of everything– soap, soda, sleep, but not sun, of course. The end of the month drought. And naturally everyone has been paid — already — and packing all sorts of money with no place to spend it, so it slides back and forth across gaming tables, boxes, bare ground. By tomorrow morning half the compound will have the other half’s money, but of course, with nothing to splurge on, the gods of odds will readjust the imbalance by the next dawn.”
